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Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

ethanhein.com

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Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#151

Post by mnw21cam »

dhosek wrote: post #137

Instruments which have a non-discrete set of pitches (as well as voices) will tend towards the more harmonious (so to speak) tuning when playing in harmony. You’ll notice this in choirs, for example, where singing a capella, the chords will follow nice integral ratios of frequencies. Fretless string instruments and the trombone are obvious cases of instruments which can do micro-tuning, but it’s worth noting that bra…

Brass instruments have a finger loop on the third valve loop, but it's not primarily for adjusting to just temperament.

Most brass instruments have three valves. The first lowers the pitch by a tone. The second lowers the pitch by a semitone. The third lowers the pitch by a tone and a half. If you need to lower the pitch by two tones, then you press the second and third valves at the same time, and that works fine. However, if you need to lower the pitch by three tones, then you need to press all three valves at the same time. However, that adds the length of all the valve loops together to the total length of the instrument, whereas to lower the pitch by a fixed interval you need to multiply the length of the instrument by a certain amount, and so to truly lower the pitch by three tones you need to add a little bit more length beyond that supplied by pressing all three valves together. That's what the finger loop on the tubing for the third valve is for, so you can slide it out a bit for certain low notes.

Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#152

Post by coldtea »

porridgeraisin wrote: post #149
coldtea wrote: post #148

> The best-sounding note combinations (to Western people) are the ones derived from the first few harmonics. In other words, you get the nicest harmony (for Western people) when you multiply and divide your frequencies by ratios of the smallest prime numbers: 2, 3, and 5. He keeps writing "for western people" but some parts of these are inherent in the human ear evolution and rather universal. All around the world we…

Nit: Mostly the octave and the fifth in Indian music. Thirds aren't as much of a structural pillar.

Yeah, they opt for more microtonal/modal flavors.

Though yaman raga is very popular and has a regular third, while other ragas still have a third-ish note, but microtonically adjusted up/down from the major and minor variants.

Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#153

Post by alephnil »

post-it wrote: post #28

> If you watch slow-motion video of a guitar string vibrating, you’ll see a complex, evolving blend of squiggles. These squiggles are the mathematical sum of all of the string’s different harmonics. This is incorrect. If you watch a video like [0], the squiggles aren't real, they're an artifact of a rolling shutter camera. A real slowmo camera will correctly show the entire string vibrating[1]. The rest of the articl…

You would need a frame rate higher than the Nyquist frequency of highest harmonic you want to capture. Since the fundamental frequency of the lowest pitch sting is 83.4 Hz, and you want to capture up to the fifth harmonic (at 83.4 Hz * 5 = 417 Hz) and double that to get the Nyquist frequence, so at least 834 fps. So you would need a high speed camera with 1000 fps to capture the real vibrations.

Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#154

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #84
JohnMakin wrote: post #39

I was born with something not quite like perfect pitch, but when something is even slightly off tune it caused physical discomfort for me. My cs department had a cool project class where you built what was basically a raspberry pi with a microcontroller by hand, and you had to use the dumb speaker and controller to make your own music firmware to produce notes. the challenge involved, was basically, the processor’s c…

> I was born with something not quite like perfect pitch, but when something is even slightly off tune it caused physical discomfort for me. Define off tune? 12 TET? Just intonation? Bohlen-Pierce (56 TET) ? The "in tune" notes are as much a function of culture as physics.

> The "in tune" notes are as much a function of culture as physics.

Huh? Pitch ratios are not a social construct, it's just arithmetic.

Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#155

Post by rwmj »

kazinator wrote: post #129
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been doing audio software for 25-30 years. I have no idea what sort of synthesis you'd be doing where the processor clock played any roll at all. Waveform synthesis is normally done in buffers (8 to 8192 samples), and the "clocking" to convert the sample stream into an analog waveform is done by the audio interface/DAC, not the CPU. If you were basically implementing a DAC, then yes, the clock would matter a lot…

You've not done it long enough to have worked with machine language programs that used instruction timing to click a speaker. This worked well in 1980's microcomputers which used an accurate, crystal oscillator clock. IC's like the MOS6502 or Intel 8086 don't have built-in clocking. The boards were large and costly enough to afford a clock; and often it was dual purposed. E.g. in Apple II machines, the master oscilla…

As in the Manic Miner soundtrack on the ZX Spectrum: https://cirrusretro.com/listen/5333-manic-miner-zx-spectrum (warning: loud and annoying!)

Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#156

Post by fifticon »

did they mention that you can cheat this when e.g. singing, by changing pitch dynamically to fit the chords you are working with? In theory, a synthesizer or sound card could do the same. Of course, this could have other undesirable side effects.

Maybe this was implied by the "just tuning"?

Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#157

Post by reverius42 »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #154
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was born with something not quite like perfect pitch, but when something is even slightly off tune it caused physical discomfort for me. Define off tune? 12 TET? Just intonation? Bohlen-Pierce (56 TET) ? The "in tune" notes are as much a function of culture as physics.

> The "in tune" notes are as much a function of culture as physics. Huh? Pitch ratios are not a social construct, it's just arithmetic.

And the choice of which ratios "sound good" is cultural, to some extent.

Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#158

Post by khafra »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #154
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was born with something not quite like perfect pitch, but when something is even slightly off tune it caused physical discomfort for me. Define off tune? 12 TET? Just intonation? Bohlen-Pierce (56 TET) ? The "in tune" notes are as much a function of culture as physics.

> The "in tune" notes are as much a function of culture as physics. Huh? Pitch ratios are not a social construct, it's just arithmetic.

There's definitely some physical underpinnings--most music systems have the concept of an octave which maps nicely onto frequency-doubling, for example. But there's also culture: For a purely Western example, even-tempering is in tune, but you'll hear different "beat patterns" for a given interval than with an instrument tuned for music in just one key.

Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#159

Post by davidee »

Like most things in music there's a real distinction between technical perfection (tuning is one, rhythm another) and music feeling alive. It's why perfectly quantized rhythms and music sound lifeless.

Our perception of these things (for most, not all) is incredibly fluid, much like our perception of time. Music that moves us tends to have the right "technical imperfections". Too much and it comes off as amateur, too little, and it comes off as sterile.

Even on a production-level, the right amount of harmonic distortion/non-linearity can be a huge benefit to how sounds are perceived. The amount of soft-saturation tooling in modern electronic/in-the-box music production is wild. Almost every modern plugin seems to include some kind of "warmth" control now.

Yet another example how perfect reproduction doesn't sound quite right.

Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#160

Post by sdeframond »

dahart wrote: post #63
post-it wrote: post #28

> If you watch slow-motion video of a guitar string vibrating, you’ll see a complex, evolving blend of squiggles. These squiggles are the mathematical sum of all of the string’s different harmonics. This is incorrect. If you watch a video like [0], the squiggles aren't real, they're an artifact of a rolling shutter camera. A real slowmo camera will correctly show the entire string vibrating[1]. The rest of the articl…

Hold on. Your first video is indeed a rolling shutter artifact. But your second video never shows enough of the string to see the harmonics. When you (for example) pluck with a finger on the 12th fret, you absolutely do have a real physical squiggle vibrating in the string, with one node and two antinodes. With a 7th fret harmonic, there are 3 antinodes, with a 5th fret harmonic there are four. There are squiggles, a…

You can actually see the node with the naked eye. No need for slow mo: the stays put while the rest of the string looks like a blurry mess.
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